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Christopher S. Bond

News about Christopher S. Bond, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Updated: Feb. 23, 2010

Christopher S. Bond has served as United States senator from Missouri since 1986. Mr. Bond and four other Republican senators broke ranks with their party on February 22 to advance a $15 billion job-creation measure put forward by Democrats. The rare bipartisan breakthrough came after months in which Republicans had held together to a remarkable degree in an effort to thwart President Obama's agenda. Mr. Bond of Missouri voted after it became evident that Democrats would prevail.

Christopher (Kit) Bond, Missouri's senior senator, was first elected to the Senate in 1986. The 72-year-old Republican stalwart of Missouri politics announced on January 8, 2009, that he would not seek another six-year term. "In 1973, I became Missouri's youngest governor," Bond said. "I do not aspire to become Missouri's oldest senator."

Bond grew up in the town of Mexico, Mo., where he still lives with his wife. His family was part-owner of the largest business in town, A.P. Green, which made heat-resistant bricks. He graduated from Princeton and the University of Virginia law school, and then clerked for one of the great pioneers of the civil-rights movement, Judge Elbert Tuttle of the 5th Circuit in Atlanta. Later, Bond returned to Missouri to practice law, and in 1968, at age 29, he ran for Congress but narrowly lost. He was elected state auditor in 1970 and then elected governor, at age 33, in 1972. He lost his 1976 re-election bid to Democrat Joseph Teasdale but won a comeback victory against Teasdale in 1980. After two years in private life, he ran for the Senate against Harriett Woods, who had come close to beating Bond's longtime ally, Republican Sen. John Danforth, in 1982. The campaign is best remembered for a negative ad that Woods ran depicting a farmer breaking into tears as he tells Woods about the foreclosure on his farm and names Bond as a board member of the insurance company that handled the foreclosure. The ad backfired, Woods fell in the polls, and Bond won, 53-47 percent.

Bond got his political start as a member of a group of young, reform-minded Republicans -- his former Senate colleague Danforth was also a member-working against the Democratic political establishment in Missouri, and he can be a strong partisan on occasion. On Election Night 2000, he was furious when St. Louis Democrats persuaded a state judge to order the city's polls to remain open an extra three hours. An Appeals Court overturned the order within 45 minutes, but Bond maintained that the election had been stolen. Republican Jim Talent lost his bid for governor that year, and GOP Sen. John Ashcroft lost his re-election, both by narrow margins. In Washington, Bond became heavily involved in the election procedures bill in the wake of the 2000 presidential vote-count battle in Florida. The centerpiece of the bill was its national standards for voting equipment coupled with $3.5 million in federal aid for statewide voter registries.